Mr. Chair, Mr. Vice-Chair and members of the committee, good afternoon.
Thank you for inviting us to speak to you this afternoon. My name is Victoria Owen, and I am the Chief Librarian of the University of Toronto Scarborough. I represent the Canadian Federation of Library Associations.
With me is Katherine McColgan, the Executive Director of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations.
CFLA comprises national, regional, and provincial library associations that represent Canadian libraries and archives. Libraries have a societal role to provide equitable access to information and preserve knowledge. In Canada the Copyright Act recognizes the unique function of libraries to achieve the government's public policy objectives around research, innovation, and lifelong learning through the act's exceptions and limitations.
CFLA applauds Canada for steadfastly maintaining the copyright term of life plus 50 years, established in the Berne convention. CFLA also praises Parliament's 2016 amendment for the creation of alternate format works for persons with perceptual disabilities, in compliance with the 2013 Marrakesh treaty.
CFLA is quite satisfied with the fair dealing exceptions in the act. With the 2012 modernization, Parliament confirmed fair dealing and added new purposes for education, parody, satire, and user-generated content.
Decades before the 2012 amendment, the shift to licensed content, rather than purchased, and the massive increase in the use of freely available digital materials was well under way. Some argue that the 2012 amendments contributed to a decline in Canadian publishing. This is a flawed argument.
First of all, the Canadian publishing industry is not in decline. In fact, Statistics Canada reports a profit margin increase from 9.4% in 2012 to 10.2% in 2016. Second, public and academic libraries invest heavily in electronic materials, and the libraries have paid up front for all the permitted uses. For example, at my university, where the licences or fair dealing do not cover use, transactional licences are paid. In 2017-18 the University of Toronto libraries paid more than $285,000 in transactional licences. This is over and above the $27.7 million spent on acquisitions, 75% of which is spent on electronic resources.
Fair dealing promotes innovative interactions that create new works and contribute to the economy.
In the digital environment, content in libraries is acquired under licence. This often means that clauses in a contract override fair dealing uses and other statutory rights. Interlibrary loans may be prohibited, and Canadians may be unable to print an excerpt of a work. The Copyright Act should prevent contracts from overriding exceptions and limitations that undermine citizens' statutory rights and the public policy goals of education and research.
CFLA believes that the principles in the Copyright Act should be applied consistently. The 2016 amendment to ratify the Marrakesh treaty permitted the circumvention of digital locks to achieve access for people with a print disability. Technological protection measures disadvantage digital works. In order to exercise statutory rights, CFLA recommends that the act be amended to exempt exceptions for libraries, archives, and museums from the prohibition on circumvention, including fair dealing uses. The law should be clear that it is only illegal to circumvent digital locks for the purpose of copyright infringement.
With most government information exclusively distributed over the Internet, researchers, libraries, and archives must be assured that making copies of digitized and born digital government works for preservation and dissemination does not violate copyright. Copyright on federal government publications, crown copyright, should not apply to works that the government has freely made available to the public.
Canadian libraries are working toward reconciliation and may hold indigenous knowledge through research, appropriation, or with the participation of indigenous communities and authors. Canada must be consistent with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. CFLA recommends that Canada acknowledge the rights of indigenous peoples to maintain, control, protect, and develop traditional knowledge and cultural expressions within our intellectual property regime, and incorporate access, use, and protection by developing appropriate protocols with indigenous peoples.
Canada has achieved balance in the Copyright Act by granting extensive economic rights and moral rights to creators and copyright owners, and by granting limited exceptions to these economic rights to users, libraries, and cultural institutions. These exceptions serve the public interest, advance public policy goals, and fuel Canada's innovation and economy.
Thank you.